A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman Read Free Book Online Page B

that, no, it didn’t seem like a letter from James Baker III. The senior Gelmans sighed, shook their heads, resumed frying fish.
    Slava remained with the bricktionary. Hinky, lunker, wattles. Taro, terrazzo, toodle-oo. “Levity” became a Jewish word because Levy was a Jewish surname in America. “Had had”—knock-knock—was a door. A “gewgaw” was a “gimcrack,” and a “gimcrack” was “folderol.” “Sententious” could mean two opposite things, and wasn’t to be confused with “senescent,” “tendentious,” or “sentient.” Nor “eschatological” with “scatological.” This language placed the end of the world two letters away from the end of a bowel movement.
    Russian words were as stretchy as the meat under Grandmother’s arm. You could invent new endings and they still made sense. Like peasants fidgeting with their ties at a wedding, the words wanted to unlace into diminutives: Mikhail into Mishen’ka (little Misha), kartoshka into kartoshechka (little potato). English was colder, clipped, a brain game. But English was brilliant. For some reason, in the bedroom, all this gave him skin against Grandfather.
    Grandfather grunted and, avoiding Slava’s eyes, rose. Downstairs, a salsa had started up, the dull bass making the same point over and over. Moving toward the door, Grandfather shuddered and lost his stride, reaching out his arms as if he were going to slip. But seeing no help rushing from his grandson, he got his hand on the bureau, righted himself, and walked out.

–3–
    T he east-facing wall of the Spartak Dance Club was not, strictly speaking, any longer a wall. Three quarters of Minsk had been bombed into rubble, which explains why it’s so ugly today, rebuilt after the war in the socialist style. But even before victory was declared over the Germans, the Saturday-night dances at the Spartak Dance Club had resumed. The people needed dances as much as bread, Stalin had said. The entire country rushed to reopen its dance halls, those villages without one scrounging to convert something, anything, that could hold a gramophone and a dance platform. Two months after V-E Day, the Spartak Dance Club in Minsk was back in regular operation despite remaining in possession of only three walls, which meant that Sofia Dreitser’s older sister Galina wouldn’t be attending the Saturday-night dances because, in her view, the other walls could go crumbling at any moment, and then that would be a pretty costly dance, wouldn’t it.
    But Sofia loved to dance. She had to be more careful nowadays, with no father or brother or mother to look after her, and men back from the war with a hollowed-out look in their eyes and a hunger that even a woman’s hand paled beside. So she danced by herself or with a female friend. That was the concession Galina had managed to extract from her wild younger sister; Sofia would go to the dances only if accompanied by Rusya, the Slav girl next door, who joked to Galina with her characteristic coarseness, “You don’t mind your sister dead if the walls crumble, so long as she doesn’t get raped?” But Rusya went along, and twirl she and Sofia did, casting longing glances at the army captains back from the front in their uniforms, and at the neighborhood boys, who in the span of four years had become men. There was Misha Surokin, the half-moon of a scar running down the right side of his face; and Yevgeny Gelman, the hooligan from Sofia’s neighborhood, looking as unserious as she remembered him; and Pavlik Sukhoi, a facial tic he had acquired in the war making him wince twice a sentence. They were the same but not the same.
    And so when the waltz started up on this Saturday night, it was Sofia and Rusya, approximating the moves best as they could from the films they had seen before the war,imagining themselves in some grand castle in Austria, switching up the lead every minute or so, Sofia pretending strict indifference toward the men leering from the